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Lot essay

"For three-quarters of a century, until Donald Friend, Sidney Nolan and Brett Whiteley, S.T Gill had the sharpest pen in the South. He recorded with sprightly directness the social activities in the colony, first in South Australia and then on the gold-fields of Victoria. Camps, mountain ranges, grog tents, herders, shops, street scenes, funerals, skeletons, the equipment of the mining fields and explorers along with topography were registered as he had promised when he set up a studio in Adelaide "Correct resemblances to horses, dogs etc., with local scenery etc., executed to order. Residences sketched and transferred to paper suitable for home conveyance.'... He was in fact, a visual journalist of the vernacular - whether purely objective or humourously derisive."(E Lynn, The Australian Landscape and its Artists, Sydney, 1977, p.30)

The Kangaroo Hunt is an informative example illustrating life in Australia in the mid to later half of the nineteenth century. The very evident trait here is the desire for those in Australia to be seen to be doing what their perceived peers were doing 'back home' in England. Gentlemanly pursuits such as hunting, despite obvious differences in terrain and prey, allowed members of the squatocracy to ally themselves with their idea of how they should be behaving. Gill's work allowed such members of the emerging middle and upper middle classes to own works that portrayed their own world and for a time, he was highly successful. Most importantly they remain today as historical and social records and in some cases the only renditions of activities and a way of life that would otherwise be potentially lost.

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